Replication of “The Opportunity Cost of Conflict: Statistically Comparing Israel and Synthetic Israel” (Yusaku Horiuchi, Asher Mayerson), Political Science Research and Methods, 2015.  

* Description: What would Israel’s economy have looked like without the 2000 Palestinian Intifada? This article examines this counterfactual question by statistically comparing the economic growth trajectories of Israel and a “synthetic” Israel, which is constructed by applying a method proposed by Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003) and Abadie, Diamond and Hainmueller (2010, 2014). The results of the analysis suggest that Israel’s per capita gross domestic product during the Second Intifada was reduced by an average of about $2,003 per year (in 2005 US dollars). This amounts to about 8.6 percent of the 2000 baseline level. In the case of the Second Intifada, the opportunity cost of conflict was indeed substantial and significant.

* Files included in this package

- ReadMe.txt (this file)
- Horiuchi-Mayerson_PSRM.do (Stata do file)
- Horiuchi-Mayerson_PSRM.dta (Stata data file)
- Horiuchi-Mayerson_PSRM.txt (Stata log file)
* Program: Stata Version 13.1

* Additional program required: Please install “synth” <http://web.stanford.edu/~jhain/synthpage.html> by writing the the following command in the Stata command line: “ssc install synth, replace all“. The results of this paper is based on the most update version of this package as of December 20, 2014.

* Horiuchi-Mayerson_PSRM.dta is a small subset of the Quality of Government (QoG) Standard Data available at <http://qog.pol.gu.se/data/datadownloads/qogstandarddata>. The version of QoG data used for this paper is 20-December-2013 version (file name: “qog_std_ts_20Dec13.dta”).

* Process of Replication:
	(1) Place the do file (Horiuchi-Mayerson_PSRM.do) and data file (Horiuchi-Mayerson_PSRM.dta) in the same folder.
	(2) Run Horiuchi-Mayerson_PSRM.do.

* Most Recent Date of Successful Replication: December 20, 2014

* Data Description (See the paper for details; check the do file on how this replication dataset used in this paper was generated.)

Contains data from Horiuchi-Mayerson_PSRM.dta

  obs:        14,137                          The Quality of Government Standard Dataset 2013, Time-Series
 vars:            10                          5 Sep 2014 00:32
 size:     1,201,645                          (_dta has notes)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
              storage   display    value
variable name   type    format     label      variable label
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ccode           double  %8.0g                 Country Code Numeric
cname           str29   %29s                  Country Name
year            double  %9.0g                 Year
bl_asy15mf      float   %7.2f                 Average Schooling Years, Female and Male (15+)
pwt_csg         float   %9.0g                 Consumption Share of GDP (%)
pwt_isg         float   %9.0g                 Investment Share of GDP (%)
pwt_openk       float   %9.0g                 Openness to Trade, Constant Prices
wdi_exp         double  %10.0g                Exports (% of GDP)
wdi_gdpc        double  %10.0g                GDP per Capita, PPP (Constant International USD)
wdi_imp         double  %10.0g                Imports (% of GDP)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sorted by:  ccode  year
